Joe Blundo: Ancient artifacts headed for Ohio History Center, thanks to family

Joe Blundo The Columbus Dispatch @joeblundo

Sunday

Jan 27, 2019 at 5:00 AMJan 27, 2019 at 11:48 AM

Someone gave Lois Bott a spear point and stone bowl when she was a teen-ager. Now, about 80 years later, she learns that they're significant artifacts that belong in a museum.

Both 94-year-old Lois E. Bott and her 13,000-year-old spear point have stories to tell.

She was a teenager growing up near Big Walnut Creek on the East Side when someone (she can’t remember who) found several spear points and an ancient rock bowl on land behind her family home.

"We never gave them much thought," Bott said.

But she also never discarded them.

The home where Bott was raised, housed on what is now part of John Glenn Columbus International Airport property, was torn down. Bott became a nurse, married and raised four children.

About 40 years ago, she gave the spear points and bowl to her son, Dave, a musician who lives in Berwick.

Recently, he decided to contact the Ohio History Center to see whether its experts could tell him anything about the pieces.

Bradley Lepper, curator of archaeology, knew pretty quickly that the Botts had something special. One of the spear points is 13,000 years old, making it among the oldest human-made things in Ohio.

"Very rare, absolutely, compared to the rest of the artifacts we see," Lepper said.

Countless spear points (they’re not called arrowheads because they predate the invention of the bow and arrow) have been found in Ohio, but few date back as far.

"I think there’s a couple of thousand that have been documented in the state," Lepper said.

The flint-spear point, worn down from frequent resharpening, would have been in use before the last Ice Age, when mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the land. It might have been embedded in the hides of any number of impressive mammals as its owners, called the Clovis people, hunted.

The stone bowl, which is probably 4,000 to 10,000 years old, is in some ways even more interesting, Lepper said.

It was probably a grinding vessel, fashioned from a very hard igneous rock, its rim planed so that it could be attached to a basket with some kind of natural adhesive. Some have been discovered in California, but Lepper knows of none found here.

"You’re not supposed to find these things in Ohio."

Lepper said artifacts are like words on a page, each adding to the story of our ancient ancestors.

"By having a lot of them, you can sort of tell the evolutionary story of how they changed in subtle ways over time, or how they made them slightly different in northern Ohio than southern Ohio. There’s so much you can learn."

The Botts have decided to donate the spear point and bowl to the Ohio History Center, where they can be studied by researchers and possibly viewed by museum visitors.

And so the story gets richer.

Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

jblundo@dispatch.com

@joeblundo

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